Culture Shock of the Covid-19 on TikTok: Users Taste Shift for Video Content in China

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a global impact and served as an economic and cultural shock. In 2022, Shanghai was in an entire lockdown for two months due to quarantine policies adopted by China to prevent the pandemic from spreading. During this period, social media became a crucial part of peoples lives, used for communication, entertainment, and receiving news. This article investigates the post-pandemic effect of Covid-19 on social media by conducting a study using customized surveys to examine users preference shift of video content on TikTok, Chinas most popular short-video social platform. The study found a correlation between TikTok users preference shift for short video content and the Covid-19 pandemic in China. The participants were divided into social groups based on age, gender, and occupation, but the study did not find any significant differences in their responses to this correlation. There were high shifts in taste for video content related to the Covid-19 pandemic, such as health news and indoor exercise. The study shows that shifts in the purpose of using social media are significant when experiencing a cultural shock. Users often respond to cultural shock by switching to certain types of video content. Future scholars studying media psychology and exploring the elements that shift consumers gratification and purposes of using social media can benefit from this article.